Friday, November 23, 2012

Beer with a Painter: Ellen Trumbo

with Ellen Trumbo, in front of her Grand Haven Landscape
photographs of us by Tyler Loftis

Ellen Trumbo’s paintings are (like her!) full of light and
painted with an absence of showmanship. She lives in Grand Haven, a beautiful town on Lake
Michigan. She and a small group of
fellow painters have created an aesthetic sanctum of creative energy in the
Midwest, and I like to visit, write, collaborate, and feed off their
inspiration.

Ellen is the kind of woman who quietly runs everything in
town – and by that I mean she manages five restaurants, co-directs a gallery,
and fundraises for multiple cultural events per year. She is also the friend who can play a mean game of trivia and
doesn’t flinch when I get competitive at beach soccer and nearly break her toe.

Ellen’s landscapes, such as the mural installed in The Grand Restaurant, capture the sensate experience of this place: the breadth and
movement of the lake and beach. We
sat in front of this piece with a couple glasses of locally made Vander Mill
hard apple cider, and talked painting.
Thank you, Ellen!

JS: I feel like your work is so much about connection to
place. The sense of touch – your energetic mark and brushstroke – seem a
metaphor for tactility and connection to the landscape. How does where you come from
originally, and where you live now inform your painting?

ET: I would imagine there is something innate about the way
a person puts down paint. I don’t know if my paintings will always look like
this, but it is what they are right now.

I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but I left home when I was
young and didn’t do any landscape painting out there. The landscape is pretty different there - it’s much
brighter, the sun is really intense.
The riverbeds are dried up; everything is kind of brown in the
summer. There is a lot of
concrete, spread out and sprawling in the suburban towns.

Here, in Western Michigan, it is about water - that deep
space of water and expansiveness, and the paintings incorporate that. I really
love this place. I think it’s beautiful.
That’s why I’m here. There
are a lot of things that are beautiful about here, and a lot of it is about
leaving it how it is. It’s not
super developed. Even the places
that are developed, there is still a lot that’s natural – the pine trees and
the dunes.

Ellen Trumbo, Landscape, 2011, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches

My teenage years are when I started painting. The earliest painters I loved were the
Color Field painters. I had this good environment in high school, where my
teacher set up a studio, and she would go in the back and work. We had freedom to work as we
wanted. It was a fairly serious
work environment, a pretty heavy studio practice, which now that I think about
it, is the best way to start out.
We were expected to research on our own. There aren’t too many museums or actual paintings in
Oklahoma, but we researched through books, and kept a journal of what we were
into. We were expected to be self-motivated. My teacher was pretty incredible. She had property in the wilderness of
Southern Colorado and would take her students there to make art. Some people did paintings, some did
site-specific art, but she would put us up in her house and just take us there,
just because. I went out there a
couple times. Part of it was
simply about realizing you have to do it.
You have to figure out what you’re interested in and what you want to
make.

JS: One thing that captivates me in your work is the force
and directness. Can you tell me about this process and how you preserve that energy
in the painting?

ET: Most of the marks in my paintings are made really
fast. They are fast decisions. I think that’s probably why the
paintings have that raw quality. I don’t necessarily finish paintings quickly,
but I’ll make fast decisions and then stop for a while and sense what’s there. I do step back a lot. The composing part is one of the first
things that happens in the painting.
Sometimes it changes, but that’s an aspect that is really clear to
me. Making the forms, and making
them work together, that’s where I’m making fast decisions, and they’re not
always right, so I make more and more, and they kind of accumulate. Part of the painting is knowing that, if
there’s a tree, the tree is where it is.
But if that is so set, then the painting isn’t alive. So the immediacy and fast decisions are
because I’m trying to keep it breathing and alive. Composition is not
wishy-washy for me. It is an area
where I feel really strong and clear about what I’m doing. I’m a drawer, a draughtsman. Knowing how things are set up or spaced
out, locating the edges of things. The paintings don’t usually start out as drawings, but I find
the edges of things. Then it is
about how to build within that. Where
I see two colors might be separated, I might draw the edge before I have the
colors. In this mural, you can see
the process, where the blue water goes off as a horizontal and that green line goes
down as a diagonal. That part of
the painting is left open. It is an interesting part of it, because you can see
how the painting is made. The
craft isn’t hidden. It gets tightened
down, and then opened up at points.
That is the mystery of painting.

Ellen Trumbo, Grand Haven Landscape, oil on canvas, 112 x 84 inches

JS: Can you tell me about the process of making this mural, Grand Haven Landscape, installed here at
the Grand Restaurant, and how the idea came about?

ET: Actually, funnily enough, it wasn’t my idea. It was a composition that Chris [Protas] and Mike [Coleman] designed, and was originally supposed to be a
collaboration between them. Then I
took on the project, but I used their idea of a mural about this place. They had even gathered historical
photographs. The first layer of
this painting is a drawing that Chris made. It is one flat shape, that, when I
first saw it, looked like a flat bird, and a cropped off corner, and a diagonal
of water through the middle. The composition of two landforms, separated by
this diagonal of water, was there from the very beginning. When I saw his drawing, and started to
paint it, I went to this spot where I imagined that it was, and made
drawings. It is across the river
up on the hill. So, many specific
details in the painting are based on drawings done on-site and brought back to
the studio.

Ellen Trumbo, Downs Lake, 2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

JS: So it is really based on a synthesis of an imagined
landscape, someone else’s drawing, and your drawings made on-site.

ET: Yes. It was
pretty epic. But, I would say that
in my work in general, there is usually a synthetic element. A couple years ago, I was painting out
of my head, but sometimes it would start from life or from a drawing. Recently, I’ve mostly been doing one or
two day paintings. So I don’t take
them back to the studio and work on them.
But for me, a couple of them do have that quality of adding something
else in, almost like I’m in the studio.
Like the painting Down’s Lake. I have a photograph of it in an earlier
state, and it was much more direct, from life, what I was sensing there. But in the final product, I had
inserted some ideas or elements that weren’t so directly from life. Even at art school, which was the last
time I was painting purely from life, my paintings had a quality that’s not
totally from life. I’ve always
been inserting or synthesizing.

JS: You live with and collaborate with close friends on
artwork installed in venues around the town, and numerous public projects and
events, including helping to run a gallery with an active exhibition
schedule. How do these activities
and your collaborations and relationships play a part in your work?

ET: There is
motivation and energy generated from the group because we have collaborations
and projects going on constantly – murals or events like ArtWalk. There is a
sense of making art for something,
whether it is the restaurants or these events. There is a specific nature to that. Also, most of the
feedback I get is from close friends.
I am so grateful for that.
To have people that care that much, that believe in each other to do
that much work to talk about someone else’s painting is very rare. To sit down in front of someone’s
painting, to articulate what you think and feel, and get to know them and their
work—it’s a lot of work. It’s a
lot easier to just say, “Oh, I like that,” or “I don’t really like that.”

JS: Can we talk about your studio environment? How many
paintings do you have going at a time?
I know you have a demanding job, managing several restaurants in
town. Are you able, in the course
of a busy lifestyle, to work for sustained periods of time?

ET: I do tend to work on a bunch of paintings at the same
time. And I have a lot of
unfinished paintings in the studio.
But lately, the paintings that take only a day or two are an antidote. I
used to labor more over paintings.
I have some that are probably six years old and are just not done
yet. And some are newer, but still
not finished. Since my time is now
more limited, I’ve been working in a more concentrated way on one painting and
then letting it go, which has been fun.
There was a long period when I had almost as much time as I could ever
desire to work, and I didn’t finish a lot of paintings. It just meant that I painted over and
over again on the same paintings.
You can move things around in a painting and the painting changes, and
it is limitless. Earlier, I was talking about structure and things being
set. But that’s not enough, so
things do move. You move
things around, but not forever, because otherwise there is no end. You go too
crazy on that, and you go crazy.

You have to be able to push yourself. You could make the
same painting over and over again if you wanted to. But you could also use life and life experiences and
situations to help you mentally to deal with your own painting. You might need
to do some things that are not in front of the canvas to develop those
skills. I’m working in management
now, and you realize there are only a certain amount of hours in the day. You learn how to not waste time, and not
make decisions that are just for the heck of it. It’s always towards something. And you make so many mistakes
that you stop judging so much. That is good, because painting and an ideal of beauty is a
pretty heavy thing, if you’re unwilling to make something that’s not beautiful.

with a painting by Mike Coleman, Adam Dahlstrom, and Derek Johnson (collaboration) in background